The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child

by doener • 5 years ago

200 237 5 years ago

arbirk• 5 years ago

As a child of aid workers (hippie parents) I lived as a kid and teen in southern Africa. I was critical of the OLPC project mainly because it was a closed eco system, but told to shut up.

Poor communities are used to repairing everything that can be repaired and it seemed to me, that giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better starting point.

inetknght• 5 years ago

A much better starting point would be to make laptops able to be as easily repaired as a normal PC.

azinman27• 5 years ago

PCs at the time were much more expensive, ran closed source Windows (versus open sourced Linux of OLPC), weren’t good ebook readers given their screen technologies, didn’t have mesh networking technologies, and a whole host of other things that made the OLPC far more interesting and hypothetically relevant to the problem they were trying to solve.

ferdowsi2• 5 years ago

iPhone internals are difficult to repair, but they make up for it with reliability. If OLPC had hit that target they could have been successful but it was basically not achievable for a mid-2000s laptop.

trhway• 5 years ago

absolutely. The OLPC looked like a well intentioned design-by-committee attempt of the first world people to solve the issue of the 3rd world.

giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better starting point

i've been in similar situation - end of 198x / start of 199x in Russia where we like the 3rd world were scrambling into computerization, and the standard PC platform with easy swappable/upgradeable components was the key here to the extent that even slightly non-standard brand-name PCs like Compaq/etc. were shunned away because the even so slightly customizations they had to their case, PSU, high-end adapters with custom drivers, custom usually non-upgradeable motherboards, etc. were making them practically feasible only to very rich companies/people.

askvictor3• 5 years ago

Is there such a thing as a standard PC (actually, laptop) platform? Some manufacturers are better than others at repairability, but between two different laptop models, even from the same manufacturer, the only things likely to be interchangeable are the RAM and the storage. The OLPC had repairability designed into it, but on the assumption that there'd be a large enough deployment of them in any given area, and you'd scavenge broken ones for parts.

I honestly don't think that it would have been much different in this respect had the OLPC been a single model of a consumer-grade laptop - parts would have been scavenged from broken ones. Except perhaps that consumer-grade laptops weren't designed for the conditions the OLPC was designed for, so would probably have failed more often.

CoastalCoder• 5 years ago

Told to shut up by whom?

james-redwood• 5 years ago

I presume his parents or anyone he raised his concerns with. From personal experience, international aid seems to attract a distinct subset of rather narcissistic and myopic people who do it for their egos rather than to help people. Despite their rude and harsh demeanour, we just have to put up with them because many of them end up climbing the leadership ranks and become even bigger psychopaths.

h2odragon• 5 years ago

Putting that money into buying up surplus commercial systems and shipping them out to disadvantaged places could have been much, much better in terms of results. It wouldn't have been near as sexy a subject for feelgood reporting.

nitrogen3• 5 years ago

Once in a whole someone has to take on projects to try to explore the solution space and break out of local optima. It doesn't always work, but when it does, the gains are orders of magnitude. One example is the nascent reusable rocket industry vs. the existing space shuttle and converted ICBMs.

azinman27• 5 years ago

I haven’t read this new book. But I was at the Media Lab when all of this was going on (without directly working on it). Reading the reviews of this book, all I can say is if “scholars” ran this world, nothing would be done. Inaction is far easier than action, and no one has all the answers before big leaps are taken (and this was an insanely ambitious project). I also say that as a fan of some of the reviewers.

No doubt mistakes were made, and likely some where called out back then (including critiques I did hear at the time). But it’s also a very different world in 2022, where things like cell phones and Facebook have taken over the planet… I hope the book contextualizes this.

zestyping• 5 years ago

if “scholars” ran this world, nothing would be done. Inaction is far easier than action, and no one has all the answers before big leaps are taken

Do you mean to defend the OLPC folks as action-takers, or criticize them as scholars?

emmelaich• 5 years ago

Surely defend.

"I also say that as a fan of some of the reviewers."

azinman27• 5 years ago

I'm saying OLPC folks were action takers. They sought to do an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world, close the digital divide, bring up a new class of digital natives into an economy they'd otherwise be left out of, enable a suite of educational materials that otherwise wouldn't be available, tackle problems of electricity and internet access in these contexts, and find generous donors & governments to help fund it all.

Without economies of scale that eventually came from cell phones, this was a pretty amazing and ambitious project!

scroot5• 5 years ago

I read the book last year.

While it is definitely a critique -- and while Ames provides a debatable framing of her overall thesis -- the accounting of the actual, on-the-ground uses of OLPC laptops is invaluable. Assessment is not the same thing as inaction. It is worth understanding what happened and attempt to frame why it happened. In fact, one could argue that the "action takers" in computing today might do well to familiarize themselves with a bit more scholarship in the first place.

magicseth• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure mine were some of the criticism you heard ;-) My critique largely focused on the imperialist attitude of the project: Negroponte described the project with hope that it would be as impactful as the "Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria" without any sense of recognition of th negative impact of those ships. When the first technical bring up touted OLPC developers running Doom on it, it was a reminder of how, no matter how much we claim technology is absent of agenda, it is many ways a reflection of the values of the developers.

azinman27• 5 years ago

Hi Seth!

Everything done by anyone is a reflection of them, their needs, constrains, ideas, and knowledge. Intention matters, and inaction is intention-less.

However I don’t think your metaphor is apt — OLPC didn’t intend to be a conquest in any way that was about extracting resources let alone bring resources those back home.

The OLPC didn’t replace something, it created something. It pointed a way.

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

I seem to remember Carlos Fuentes narrating an entire series "The Buried Mirror" starting out with that (he immediately follows it with "[Columbus put his newly-discovered] noble savage in chains") but I don't see anyone calling him racist.

ferdowsi2• 5 years ago

It's interesting to think about OLPC as a precursor to many of the hype-driven internet phenomena that promise utopian gains. It's easy to see similarities in blockchain-mania, the evangelism machines around certain technologies and programming languages, etc...

Spooky23• 5 years ago

I never thought of it that way, but I did have a few friends who were very enthusiastic about OLPC, and most of them were very interested in Bitcoin.

There’s a certain similarity in some of the ideas of libre software, self-improvement, etc.

Gigachad2• 5 years ago

Solar roadways and "infinite solar power water bottles" comes to mind. Just absolute rubbish which manages to extract funds from government programs for them to research how to strap a dehumidifier to a bottle and find out it doesn't make any sense.

leejoramo• 5 years ago

I remember reading Negroponte’s column in Wired Magazine. In the early 1990’s. I thought much of it could be described as a “precursor to many of the hype-driven internet phenomena that promise utopian gains”

In retrospect, a decent amount of his thoughts came true.

blip543213• 5 years ago

I'm a bit skeptical of the thesis of this book.

Moonshot projects usually fail, by definition. OLPC was likely to fail from the beginning. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.

We can -- and should -- diagnose and learn from everything which went wrong. The name -- Charisma Machine -- is fair. It describes what's wrong with a lot of modern MIT: big names, big charisma, and marketing over substance.

On the other hand, for the burn rate (~$12M/year), it seems like it was a worthwhile risk. If it worked as promised, the gains would be in the trillions. If it kinda-worked, the gains would still be high. I gave it maybe 5% odds, and I think that's fair for this type of project.

patcon• 5 years ago

Agree. And who learns from failure is sometimes important too.

Sometimes a project is the same old failure that has happened a 1000 times, and is otherwise owed condemnation as forseeable, but if a NEW class of person/org is getting that learning, then it can change their future trajectories in meaningful ways. I don't know what sort of org OLPC was, but perhaps it was uniquely valuable that these people to fail and learn. Or maybe it was stupid :) I'm just agreeing it's often more complicated to understand than it first appears

(The above applies to individual people, but also to organizations. For e.g., maybe non-profits or governments taking their first babysteps into failures of a certain sort, is valuable in the way its not to savvy startup communities who perhaps already know to avoid certain things)

coldtea• 5 years ago

Moonshot projects usually fail, by definition. OLPC was likely to fail from the beginning. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.

No, but it can very well mean it wasn't worth trying this way - and this might have even been evident from the start not just in hindsight (see a top comment above from someone involved in the project).

wmf2• 5 years ago

I started reading the book and part of the thesis is that nothing was learned at the time and the industry is repeating similar mistakes.

blip543213• 5 years ago

Perhaps.

I think the core reasons why OLPC failed include:

1) Bad people. By bad, I don't just mean "incompetent." I mean sleazeballs in it for themselves. That's not everyone on the project, but folks like Nicholas Negroponte.

2) Bad risk management. OLPC tried to reinvent everything, down to the display technology. If you take a dozen major risks like that, only one has to fail for the project to fail.

I don't think it got far enough to reveal any fundamental reasons why it had to fail. It was a lot of bad execution.

I don't mind repeating similar mistakes if we go further next time.

e4e78a065• 5 years ago

The free market and the march of technological progress did a better job than any moonshot project designed to solve digital literacy in poor countries. Many sub-Saharan and Southeast Asian countries have better LTE rollout than rural America does. Everyone has a smartphone or tablet, made possible by the fact that cheap Android devices are really cheap but still effective. And that's because the free market doesn't care about the opinions of a bunch of committee members who all want a say in how the device is designed. It doesn't have the luxury of endless nonprofit grants. Devices either fulfill needs and make money or they don't and company goes broke.

Just because they don't do computing like _you_ do, using a laptop, doesn't mean they don't have access to the Internet for what they need.

scroot5• 5 years ago

Just because they don't do computing like _you_ do, using a laptop, doesn't mean they don't have access to the Internet for what they need.

True enough. But can we seriously call such activity "digital literacy"? What is "literate" about it?

sdenton4• 5 years ago

I actually think the OLPC was a big step in making computers more accessible. Netbooks were entirely a response to the OLPC, when companies like Asus noticed that there was a gaping, totally unserved market for low-end notebooks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

These netbooks (and especially imitators running Windows that came soon after the eeepc) were very commonplace - especially amongst university students - when I was living in East Africa in the early 2010's. They were, as you say, really cheap and effective enough. Eventually phones have caught up for many use cases, but they certainly weren't there at the time...

ClumsyPilot5• 5 years ago

"Just because they don't do computing like _you_ do, using a laptop"

Okay, can you write a book, programm an arguino, produce a song, calculate in a spreadsheets expected payments for your mortgage, design layout of your house, map out your farm for planting? No, not really.

They have devices that enable them to consume and feed the disguisting add industry and suvaliance machine, not to create.

salawat• 5 years ago

The free market and the march of technological progress did a better job than any moonshot project designed to solve digital literacy in poor countries.

Yeaaaaah. You know that had nothing to do with actually increasing digital literacy, and was actually directed at tapping into previously unexploitable markets right?

That mobile and telecom was realized before roads and secure ubiquitous access to potable water is not something that is impressive to someone whose sat through company meetings gushing over the value to be raked in by fee extracting developing markets.

Many sub-Saharan and Southeast Asian countries have better LTE rollout than rural America does.

Population density does that.

Everyone has a smartphone or tablet, made possible by the fact that cheap Android devices are really cheap but still effective. And that's because the free market doesn't care about the opinions of a bunch of committee members who all want a say in how the device is designed.

Android is also one of the most user-hostile computing platforms I've ever encountered, and I shudder to think of the people who have to tread their "first exposure to computers" being Android, then working their way back to a General Purpose computer. Android was never built as anything but a developer's portal to population of users. Nothing more. A general purpose computer, at least has utility as a springboard to conventions from which to bridge the gap to more special purpose computing regimes. Something, I might add, that that committee you disparage was more keenly interested in providing cheaply, robustly, and maintainable than any developer or architect of Android, or the handsets it runs on ever was.

Devices either fulfill needs and make money or they don't and company goes broke.

Some problems don't lend themselves to profitable solutions. Free markets optimized around immediate profit potential essentially bury and write these problems out of the equation until there is simply no other choice, which is not guaranteed to be the optimal course of action in the long run.

Just because they don't do computing like _you_ do, using a laptop, doesn't mean they don't have access to the Internet for what they need.

Correction: They can use the Internet for what someone deemed profitable to make available for them. The use cases that were not (General Purpose) remain out of reach.

It irks me when people don't fully render the positive and negative aspects of an implementation.

musicale4• 5 years ago

On the other hand, for the burn rate (~$12M/year), it seems like it was a worthwhile risk. If it worked as promised, the gains would be in the trillions.

The risk-reward calculation is important here. Arguably simply spurring interest in developing and using cheap netbook easily paid off the investment in the project in terms of benefit to the world.

disqard• 5 years ago

Read Todd Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" and you'll find this false mantra (new technology alone will magically solve a deeply human problem) being repeated throughout the history of education technology.

gadders3• 5 years ago

From what I have gathered MIT Media Lab != MIT. The Media Lab is commonly referred to as the Remedial Lab on campus. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944282

blip543213• 5 years ago

Was. Past tense. This was definitely the case around the year 2000 (and during most of OLPC).

The Media Lab has mostly stayed constant. The rest of MIT ramped up hype, marketing, branding, form-over-substance, and occasionally, corruption. Today, the Media Lab is one of the higher-integrity parts of the Institute, not by virtue of improving, but by virtue of the rest of the Institute slipping.

smm11• 5 years ago

I was enamored with this project. How couldn't everyone see this was the key to a marvelous future?

Then I adopted a dog instead, and sort of forgot about it.

zozbot23410• 5 years ago

Ah, but was it an Aibo robot dog?

yeetaccount43• 5 years ago

I gotta say the one thing the OLPC did right was the display. I wish every laptop had a full sun mode, that thing was awesome.

IIRC there were no moving parts (fan? don’t recall), which was another huge plus.

Everything else was pretty bad. Sugar (the UI) was awful and would prepare 3rd world kids for exactly no other computer. The keyboard was borderline unusable. OLPC was severely underpowered when it was released. I only ever had one, so I never got to test out interconnectivity…it seemed like it could have had a lot of potential, but judging by the rest of the marketing embellishments it probably sucked too. I seem to recall having difficulty with wifi — to be fair, at the the time, most computers had questionable wireless capabilities.

zozbot23410• 5 years ago

IIRC there were no moving parts (fan? don’t recall), which was another huge plus.

Didn't it come with a hand-crank for powering the laptop? Surely that should count as a moving part.

duskwuff4• 5 years ago

It did not. The OLPC project wanted this feature, but it proved impractical to implement.

askvictor3• 5 years ago

I attempted to get Sugar running on a computer lab I was teaching in at the time, and it was a fantastic idea, but had enough bugs for it to be effectively unusable.

would prepare 3rd world kids for exactly no other computer

The point wasn't to teach them how to use computers, otherwise they would have just shipped a Windows device. The point was to make an educational tool; even using it as an ebook reader is a big thing in places where there are no textbooks.

yeetaccount43• 5 years ago

They could have just used or written something that introduced them to standard UI metaphors instead of giving them Sugar. Probably would have saved effort.

totalZero8• 5 years ago

I prefer the idea of giving new Macs and PCs to kids in the third world. Computers and the internet are supposed to be a Great Equalizer, but that notion cannot come to fruition if the access tool provided to poor people is nowhere near as able as the access tool available to rich people. Moreover, we technologists understand the sense of identity taken up by a child who has access to devices that excite the mind and capture the imagination.

For me, it was a Commodore 64.

Sometimes, people in the first world take satisfaction in the act of helping, but forget that the impact of the help is the main object of importance. If someone were to give your kid an OLPC, you might say "it's better than nothing," but you might feel deep down that "they keep the good stuff for their own kids but they come to our country's kids with the dregs."

Closi4• 5 years ago

This is great in principle, but in reality is probably over-idealistic.

Funding is always the issue/constraint with these projects, so it’s not quite as easy as ‘just buying every child in the third world a Mac’ (if they cost three times more than an entry level PC, it’s not clear to me that 1 child with a Mac is better than 3 having entry level laptops). Ideally everyone would have the best equipment, but there is always a trade off given available resources and funds.

Furthermore, even if you had the funding to buy every child in the third world a Mac, would it be a good distribution of resources? For instance that’s probably $700 more than an entry level PC, but putting that $700 towards teaching staff for instance rather than a higher-spec laptop might have better learning outcomes.

totalZero8• 5 years ago

Your post is basically the logic behind OLPC, and many people share it. However, the logic features two weaknesses.

First, inspiration.

If you give three children $300 PCs, you may not inspire any of them. Give one lucky kid a Macbook Air, however, and they may feel so special at having something beautiful and unusual that it draws them into a lifetime of working with devices and technology. That kid may grow up to generate more utility for his community than the other three kids combined. Additionally, the presence of a Macbook Air may inspire other children or motivate the parents of those other children. Think of your first experience with the most important activities in your life. Often the first blush was a small encounter that sparked an inextinguishable passion (metaphorically). For a musician, it may be a particular concert. For a pilot, it may be a first passenger flight. For an engineer, it may be a first time dismantling an old radio. I suggest that the more nuanced that first experience, the more substantial its impact on the rest of your life.

Second, frustration.

A utility function that overvalues quantity over quality is obviously not workable. For every device costing $X we can imagine a device costing $X/k that could be purchased in greater quantity by a factor of k. However, at a certain level of cheapness, devices will frustrate users rather than empowering them.

My viewpoint is that the resource constraints are not as tight as they have been drawn to appear. Rather, it's a question of priorities. Governments prioritize other things. The US government spends >$700 billion annually on defense. People prioritize other things, too. Many engineers who live in, say, San Francisco (one of many tech hubs) go on vacation in the third world. They could buy a Mac or PC before every long vacation, tuck it into their suitcase, and spend a day finding a poor family that seems deserving. That act would most likely change one or several lives for the better while costing a small fraction of the giver's annual salary.

The resources exist, but we pretend that they cannot be apportioned for certain things while over-apportioning them to other things.

I'm a firm believer that when we want to help someone, we have to help them in light of their needs and potential, rather than our own. Children are typically easier to help than adults, because they readily accept assistance as a matter of necessity, and they are less aware of the possibilities of gaming a system designed to help them. The number one challenge to affecting a child's life positively is not their buy-in, it's our own. We have to commit to helping individuals fully and meaningfully, rather than diluting the help down so much that the likelihood of lasting impact diminishes.

morganya8• 5 years ago

But two really significant issues are maintenance and repair - those are, unfortunately, very expensive problems to address!

totalZero8• 5 years ago

It seems true to me that the easiest way to maintain a device is to build it well in the first place. This is quite challenging if your primary concern is cost. Most people who have ever purchased a Sony Vaio laptop can probably attest that they got great specs at a reasonable price, but every Sony Vaio laptop that I have purchased ended up with parts (the charger port, the power button, etc) falling off or minor components failing.

You probably noticed that in Paraguay at least, the problem you describe has some cultural roots. Disadvantaged communities have at times received free stuff that they either rejected, failed to care for, or altogether destroyed. It may be due to a sense of resentment for having received the gift, or perhaps they lacked sufficient buy-in to understand the market value of the free items. Sometimes, the free stuff does not actually fit the needs of the recipient. And usually, there is a sense of contempt from Paraguayan society at large no matter how the recipients respond (a la "look at these ungrateful paupers who don't dance for joy as we spend resources on them").

Furthermore, in Paraguay a gift given without strings attached is often doubted anyway, because it may be viewed as a means to manipulate the recipient by making them feel indebted. The smooth way to give someone a thing of value in Paraguay is to make them believe that they have somehow earned it due to preexisting factors, or alternatively to state an innocuous and clear expectation for how the gesture will be reciprocated in the future.

Anywhere you go, the recipient of a gift values the gift based on his or her own understanding and needs.

Look up the construction of houses in Itaguá for residents of the Chacarita for one example.

https://www.cronica.com.py/2015/07/23/cartes-les-regalo-una-...

I can't find the text right now, but I recall reading about houses built for indigenous folks in the Chaco. When representatives of the organization that had built the structures returned the following year, they saw that the recipients had dismantled the wooden doors and burnt them for warmth during the winter.

There's also the factor of theft, and sometimes the stolen items are surprising. The school in Cateura where the famous Recycled Orchestra came to be is one such case. At a certain point in time, they had been gifted many instruments (think Yamaha and Vincent Bach) but someone had broken in at night to uninstall and steal the school's only toilet.

There does exist some parts and repair infrastructure in many Latin American countries, as well as a secondary market for devices. There are challenges in finding parts that are neither counterfeit nor stolen, and in my experience the most capable technicians (in terms of tools and knowledge) tend to be located nearer to affluent communities. Traditional devices have a better chance of tapping into that extant marketplace than do purpose-built devices designed intentionally for the economically disadvantaged.

JKCalhoun• 5 years ago

I feel a little arrogant even proffering an opinion about what the Third World needs, but I would prefer giving books and meals to kids in the Third World. I think it is simply education that is the "Great Equalizer", computers have little to do with it.

That was the whole failure of the project in my mind.

totalZero8• 5 years ago

You can't dynamically solve a problem without acknowledging your own capacity to identify the problem. In my view arrogance comes in when there is inflexibility or a lack of attention to the problem. If anything, it takes some courage to proffer an opinion about how to really help improve a problematic situation.

Books are important. Undeniably, so are meals. A laptop can provide both books and meals in the long term. Speaking for myself, laptops were the most important (physical) tool in my educational and professional development.

Nowadays, it's tough to get a first-rate education without a computer...especially in (for example) Latin America, where physical access to informational resources can be challenging but data infrastructure tends to be present wherever you go.

localhost2• 5 years ago

This thing didn't really make any sense to me at the time.

Did they have customer validation that clearly showed that OLPC was solving real problems in educating children in developing nations? In hindsight it seemed that there were people on the ground that were questioning this already.

Did they have customer validation that clearly showed that their solution was usable by their customers?

Did they measure outcomes from shipped OLPCs and adjust the product based on that feedback? They shipped additional versions of the hardware, but was the hardware actually the solution that was needed? Did they know?

sokoloff5• 5 years ago

it seemed that there were people on the ground that were questioning this already.

Is that a good measure? Is there any disruption that’s happened since the advent of speech that didn’t have someone standing to the side opining how this was a dumb and unnecessary idea?

localhost2• 5 years ago

We have the benefit of hindsight here; it's clear that this product failed. So it's reasonable to look back at the dissenting voices and ask a reasonable question: why did the product owners ignore this feedback and did the product owners understand the problem that they were trying to solve? What could they have done differently?

utopkara• 5 years ago

The author has one opinion, here's mine:

The OLPC designers, developers, engineers, educators (and whoever contributed to the project) have done a fantastic job.

I got an OLPC for my kids through their Give 1 Get 1 program. The beautifully designed little laptop was a fantastic learning tool for children. The software and hardware kept my daughters engaged and exploring. OLPC was a way better educational tool than any available ipad software at the time. Considering the unique experience, and even now it is better than an iPad (although I am assuming the software might have caught up by now). My daughter loved programming scratch on OLPC growing up, and she preferred it to other computers and ipad too. Later on, I even installed the OLPC distro on my old Thinkpad because she wanted the simpler interface. During covid, they became more familiar with chrome and iPad, although, had it been pushed further, I believe OLPC would be a much better platform than Chrome, and iPad for learning during covid.

gabriel_fishman• 5 years ago

I went to talks by Walter Bender, Nicholas Negroponte, and others involved with OLPC at the time. At the same time I was working part-time teaching technology afterschool in the Boston Public Schools. It was pretty clear that the constructionist vision of education that the OLPC folks were promoting made sense for SOME kids, who were bright and self-motivated, but it wasn't where most kids were. A few of the kids I was working with loved working on their own projects and discovering new things. But for most kids, just giving them tools and letting them play wasn't really going to result in the kind of learning and creative expression that Papert and his colleagues were promising. We had a lot of trouble getting kids to even go to afterschool technology programs. The non-profit I was working for was even paying kids $500 to do the program.

I would imagine that if you're an education ministry with a limited budget you probably want to focus on efforts that are going to make measurable improvements for the average kids. I don't think "we deployed 1000 laptops, most of them are now paperweights or video game machines, but 10 kids are doing super creative things of their own initiative" is all that compelling to an education ministry.

scroot5• 5 years ago

One interesting aspect of the OLPC project is what it didn't attempt to do: to apply the theory of its design to first world countries that also have broad public education problems (I'm thinking specifically of the U.S.) I chalk it up to the idea that the revolution in education that the constructionists of the 60s and 70s thought would happen simultaneously along with the adoption of computing never came to pass. I can't stress enough how this vision of computing was supposed to go hand in hand with a more general transformation of education, rather than computing being its cause. I'm not sure, then, how that fit at all with the idea of pushing the technology (and none of the social or pedagogical changes) onto the third world.

mwcampbell4• 5 years ago

It was pretty clear that the constructionist vision of education that the OLPC folks were promoting made sense for SOME kids, who were bright and self-motivated, but it wasn't where most kids were.

Maybe the problem was that most of the kids' natural love of learning and creativity had already been extinguished by compulsory school. Or as Papert put it, "Children seem to be such remarkable learners on their own, but then they enter school."

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

A few of the kids I was working with loved working on their own projects and discovering new things. But for most kids, just giving them tools and letting them play wasn't really going to result in the kind of learning and creative expression that Papert and his colleagues were promising

That’s the Media Lab in a nutshell. It attracts builders from all over the world. And it naturally selects for people that are self-learners.

simplestats3• 5 years ago

If your goal is average kids, then sure, you need to focus on average kids. But I'd say the smart self-motivated kids are always the biggest bang for the buck in education. Sometimes I get a sense that people (not necessarily here) consider disproportionate success among geeks to imply a program is "backfiring".

mwcampbell4• 5 years ago

disproportionate success among geeks to imply a program is "backfiring".

Perhaps the logic is that the bright, self-motivated kids already have an advantage, so helping them get even further ahead is a net negative.

scroot5• 5 years ago

What does "bang for the buck" in education mean specifically?

If we are thinking in terms of democratic societies here, then certainly the (utilitarian) point of education should be to raise the bar especially for the "average kids," shouldn't it? Don't we want a better average in a society that we all operate together? That's to say nothing of the richness in life that education can provide...

KerrAvon2• 5 years ago

Bang for the buck in what sense? What “smart self-motivated” kid needs the help? Show us a computer screen just once and our life pattern is set.

hitekker2• 5 years ago

This passage in the OP's article is gold:

Drawing on a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, this book reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the diverse range of children who might actually use them.

The top review on goodreads[1] also resonates with that view.

Ames uncovered a far better theoretical paradigm in nostalgic design, in this case the tendency of the OLPC leadership to create something for their idealized childhood rather than the actual lived experience of children in the developing world.

If OLPC was able to see through themselves, they may have recognized the problem they were trying to solve was not the right problem at all. And that, by trying to solve it, they would alienate the very people who could help them. 5 years before OLPC came about, Bill Gates looked at the same problem space and decided against it[2]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3040698985?book_show_a...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/05/billgates...

DarylZero4• 5 years ago

the tendency of the OLPC leadership to create something for their idealized childhood rather than the actual lived experience of children in the developing world

Well I can't say I haven't made that mistake as a parent

user-one1• 5 years ago

I'm from Uruguay and here OLPC was adopted by the government in 2007. Till now every kid and teenager from public and private schools receive a "ceibalita" laptop that they can use for whatever they want. They are used at school by some teachers although not all.

During the recent pandemic the program was fundamental because it allowed all children from all socio-economic backgrounds to switch to remote learning.

Most poor kids don't have a PC at home and it's hard to access the labor market without knowing how to use one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceibal_project

DantesKite• 5 years ago

“Ames spent months in Paraguay in the actual communities that were recipients of OLPC laptops, cataloguing the experience of students and teachers. She also saw firsthand the many shortcomings of these laptops. Some of these were simple: classrooms often didn't have enough electric outlets or power strips to sustain everyone's laptop. But some were large: kids mainly used the laptops, not for creative expression, but just to consume media on the internet. They more often played video games than programmed them.”

https://www.amazon.com/Charisma-Machine-Legacy-Laptop-Infras...

AuthorizedCust• 5 years ago

* They more often played video games than programmed them.*

That’s fine! If you don’t appreciate the use of computers, what exactly could you program for? Something esoteric and arbitrary? What good is that?

morganya8• 5 years ago

Author here - I agree FWIW! :)

anonymousiam• 5 years ago

I still have two of the original OLPC laptops (green/white). I probably should have donated them years ago (to complement the other two that were automatically donated with my purchase). I gave them to my kids, but they were too young to appreciate them, and eventually I got them regular PC desktops. So they are basically unused, but probably need new batteries by now.

Anybody interested?

mimemy• 5 years ago

I am interested. I have two young grandchildren who are trying to use my original OLPC but are frustrated because the track pad has gone wonky.

sokoloff5• 5 years ago

At this point, if you’re in a place with wifi and internet, why not just get a cheap Chromebook? I think of them as a good OLPC v3.

mwcampbell4• 5 years ago

This passage from the synopsis made me stop and think:

they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves

I was a technically precocious boy; I got my start on Apple II computers in the late 80s. I think it's common for nerds of my generation to look at newer computers, particularly mobile devices, and worry that they're robbing future generations of what we had in our childhood -- a computer that gave us an open, kind of hard-to-miss invitation to tinker, learn to program, and go as deep into the software stack as we wanted to go (it wasn't actually that deep on those old computers).

I'm tempted to think that I wasn't actually that special as a kid, and if newer computers were designed for technically precocious kids, there might be more such kids in future generations. But then, in my family with two brothers and a sister, I clearly was the only computer nerd. And I think it's likely that my siblings (and especially my mother, who was using a computer for real work) were happier with later computers than they were with our first Apple IIGS. So while I admit I was initially indignant at the quote above, I can see why it was actually pointing out a real problem.

scroot5• 5 years ago

Ames' concept of the "technically precocious boy" is her entire thesis in a nutshell: that the creators of the OLPC projected their values, experiences, and assumptions onto the whole project.

I have conducted hours of interviews with early personal computing pioneers and have noticed a lot of similar backstories when they first talk about what attracted them to computing. Almost all of the men I've interviewed have some memory of taking apart and re-assembling devices when they were young boys and they recall this as being formative.

On the other hand, what is computing? What is it supposed to "be like"? Is it a technology like a car, or a bicycle, or other complex productive machinery? Or is it instead like pencil and paper and the writing systems / literacy that go along with it?

If we go with the latter concept -- a "new kind of literacy" -- then this argument of the "technically precocious boy" only applies to the specific form of the technology produced. In other words, imagine criticizing ancient Mesopotamian scribes trying to extend the reach of writing because they specifically sought to teach in other lands the imprinting reed shapes into clay. One could argue (for good reason) that this is probably a bad approach, but that's less to do with the fact that said scribes learned this process as boys and/or had some initial affinity for it.

Ames also hedges her bets in the book early on: she bases her critique entirely on the writings of people like Papert and Negroponte, but explicitly says she will not be evaluating constructivism as a pedagogical framework. That's sort of too bad -- Papert et al were not just creating computing systems they thought would revolutionize education. They assumed that there would already be some kind of forthcoming revolution in education regardless, and they wanted to secure computing's place in that new world. It never came to pass. I feel like it's an under explored angle.

Of course these are complicated questions. Ames' book is really valuable as a postmortem, especially the parts that are based on her fieldwork. And I do think that the "technically precocious boy" framing is good in that it creates space to have a really nuanced conversation about this aspect of computing and education.

nitrogen3• 5 years ago

What would a computer look like if it were designed for a technically precocious girl?

mncharity2• 5 years ago

the "technically precocious boy" is her entire thesis in a nutshell

Yuck? Amidst the many confused claims people have made for OLPC cultural imperialism, one that's valid (but seemingly rarely mentioned?) was its insistence on On Laptop Per Girl, even where that went against the grain. And IIRC, that was as much over XO for reading books, as over XO for writing or "computing". Mashing "literacy for girls" into "toys for boys", or "access to books" into "tech toy"... I hope that's not the thesis?

saltyfamiliar• 5 years ago

I'm not even that old and I completely agree with your point. One would think that easy access to beginner friendly programming languages and environments would be a boon to technically precious children. However I think for most kids, highly addictive and cheap video games and social media end up monopolizing all the time and attention. It's really sad to see all that neuroplastic potential being wasted on TikTok. Personally, I came up around the dawn of Facebook and was only (partially) saved by being too poor to afford many video games or an expensive computer, and being too much of a loner to care about Facebook.

dn3500• 5 years ago

509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded, archive here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211221041947/https://morganya....

JetAlone• 5 years ago

Thank you!

duskwuff4• 5 years ago

I was peripherally involved with this project when it was new, and my biggest takeaways would be that:

The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation. Additionally, the project placed a lot of emphasis on unusual, experimental hardware features which they were unable to fully utilize, such as the infamous hand crank (never fully shipped), an unusual hybrid capacitive/resistive touchpad (resistive features were never used), the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software), mesh networking (software was never fully implemented), hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source")... the end result was that a lot of time and effort went into designing/redesigning unique features which didn't provide a lot of value to end users.

However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, media viewing tools (like book readers and audio/movie players), or course management software. While they did thankfully ship an office productivity suite, it was literally just OpenOffice; it looked completely different from the rest of the OS, and was poorly integrated. The same was true of the web browser, which was a thin shell around Firefox. Given that these were probably the two most useful apps on the system, the system felt pretty disjointed overall.

Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project.

zozbot23410• 5 years ago

However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, book reading tools, or course management software.

OTOH, I recall that media interest in the OLPC project helped pave the way for the earliest "netbook" class devices, which could readily accommodate these features, and in turn found plenty of use as educational tools in middle-income countries. (Though not in the poorest countries nor in the earliest grades of primary education; in either case, this would have called for rugged subnotebooks - much like the OLPC itself or, more to the point, the Toughbook series which was very costly on the market.)

mjevans• 5 years ago

The need for '3-4 year old proof' devices is still acutely felt in the first world, where many of the solutions just involve adding a larger back and sides shell and hoping nothing major happens to the screen.

It really doesn't help that touchpads generally have oversimplified interfaces and poor support for any sort of peripheral that would aid in greater input speed or acuity. (Bluetooth doesn't count, I hate current wireless so much.)

ryukafalz• 5 years ago

hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source")

Wasn't this implemented? I don't have my XO-1 in front of me now but I definitely recall being able to do that.

justicezyx• 5 years ago

You know, they were funded because of these novelty. If you spend more time with international charity activity, you'll see that no one truly want to help the poor, they are more interested in showing their kindness.

KerrAvon2• 5 years ago

I think it’s a bit more complicated than that — wasn’t Negroponte involved with it?

lmm• 5 years ago

I don't think it's quite that. I think it's that the prospect of making reducing poverty your life's work and the end result is that you reduce the world poverty rate by 0.02% is just too oppressive to face head-on. So you either get people who devote themselves to the process rather than the outcome, or you get outcome-oriented people who look for shortcuts and miracle fixes. But that doesn't mean the motive is insincere.

melony• 5 years ago

There is nothing wrong with the product vision. Remove the part about the handcrank and monochrome screen, and you are basically describing a modern day Macbook. Unfortunately they did not have the budget of Apple to deliver such a device.

kumarsw• 5 years ago

I'd say this is a fair assessment of the project. It came off as overambitious with a number of high-risk project management decisions made at the expensive of a minimum-viable initial product. And this was just looking at it from an engineering point of view, ignoring whether it did actually provide value over other options for educational spending in developing countries.

Funny enough it seems like the hype it generated was its main contribution, which led to the netbook product segment and ultimately Chromebooks. I'd say its spiritual descendent is the humble grades 7-12 school chromebook with much more conventional hardware and software choices. The killer app for school Chromebooks is the combination of Google Docs and whatever Google's classroom management software is, provided cheap to schools in a long-game move by Google to hook a future generation on their office suite. Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.

zozbot23410• 5 years ago

Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.

Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)

a9h74j• 5 years ago

Provocatively, imagine if had been one Emacs per child. With EXWM.

(Actually, I was recently surprised to find that after an apt-get install on a chromebook, Emacs started up in full gui mode.)

dleslie2• 5 years ago

I have two; a friend of mine had one. We both threw Debian on them and relished in the glorious Pixel Qi display and the nigh-indestructible nature of them. Great for backpacking and road trips in dirty areas, at a then-unbeatable price.

b112• 5 years ago

These shipped?

I've been looking for a laptop with eink for a decade, so I can use it in the sun.

The new pine e-ink thing gives me hope, with a keyboard, but bah

rektide• 5 years ago

The disjointed efforts & lack of care for the most common use modes are jarring. The inability to get hardware promises really delivered sucked.

There were some really good & powerful underlying OS concepts that I think we ought have deep reverence for. Even if the hardware-layer 802.11s wifi mesh didn't work, the systems-layer link-local XMPP mesh, used to create Telepathy Tubes, was ultra-advanced systems engineering that just worked, that was supremely well engineered by discerning sharp choices.

There's so many examples of really smart really sharp visionary engineering. To tick off all the places a complete rebuild of the computing experience failed is cheap and easy. Of course there were a lot of pet project hanger-ons, a lot of non-core engineering. It's just a pity we live in such a scarce, chased society, where such a novel engineering project failed to garner the love & attention it deserved. If there's a reason OLPC failed, it's as much because the rest of the world failed to show up for some bold visionary open source engineering. And in my personal view, it's because open source was already chiefly a husk, a shell, for industrial software development. I don't think the world ever really engaged OLPC at the level it deserved, we all failed to explore a delivered viable greatness & make it our own (a difficulty amplified how long it took for Sugar builds to be available on other platforms). The positive powerful lessons XOPC had for us weren't understood or appreciated then, and we're still today hooked on sad story of failure. Rather than anyone bothering to understand the victory & success & power that was built. Out of best of breed open source systems[1].

Effectiveness could have been higher. But this project chose great tech, & it feels as much like an indicator of failure by the geeks who should have seen further. It's hard to form open source community, but there were so many good ideas here, and just a little more getting-the-ball rolling would have lead to a radically different song we sing about this. There was an incredibly interesting platform for software development in a class-room scale, extremely well envisioned, and we all failed to rise to the high standards of possibility this new, vanguard capability set out for.

[1] https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html

mavhc3• 5 years ago

That's great, but using a load of poor countries to alpha test your new OS ideas seems a bit dodgy.

Everyone should have realised inventing something brand new for every part of the stack would fail.

We want new hardware, and firmware, and OS design, and GUI design, and apps? And make it all something no one is familiar with?

908B64B1975• 5 years ago

The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation

How many of these were funded PhD thesis vs software from salaried devs?

cjbprime5• 5 years ago

None were funded PhD theses -- a mix of salaried devs, donated engineering time from partners like Red Hat, work done by volunteers in purchasing countries like Uruguay, and general open source contributions.

(I was a long-time salaried dev for OLPC.)

robinsoh8• 5 years ago

Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects

I'm so glad to see others speaking out about this. I'm 100% in agreement that's what "saviour" projects like MIT Asia, OLPC have all ended up being.

the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software)

I've said this before about the Pixel Qi panel in the XO-1. I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive (ML Jepsen) who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries and their budget expenditures were taken for a ride by Nicholas Negroponte and his gang, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.

cjbprime5• 5 years ago

low resolution

Do you mean color resolution? The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop.

DemocracyFTW• 5 years ago

Your assessment of the properties of the display specifically seem to go counter what I perceived as a convincing argument by the OLPC guy brought up in a TED talk at the time, namely, that the two biggest cost factors of a new laptop are marketing and the display unit. He then argued that the project can largely just do away with marketing altogether (plausible) and went on to say that even displays that come out of production with a single pixel error have a massively reduced price tag. From that I concluded that the project could reasonably build cheap hardware if only they went with no advertising and run-of-the-mill display units that narrowly failed quality checks.

Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead.

I feel being lied to.

nebula8804• 5 years ago

Well Pixel Qi seemed like a magical display at the time. I wonder if given a few more revisions it could have been more competitive? It always felt like a shame that we lost the option of having this display.

I have seen really cool stuff like Mirasol and CED displays come and go and it just sucks that we have seen so many nifty things never really make it. I am holding out hope for CLEARink ePaper and playNitride microLED.

profsnuggles• 5 years ago

I have an XO-1 in my closet and the display was really the only thing I loved about that laptop. I wish I had the knowledge to create a display driver for it to hook it up to a raspberry pi that could make a fun little netbook.

A display that you could actually read outdoors was super useful for me. I used the XO-1 for a few months as my actual laptop after my macbook died and I bought a macbook pro. Those were literally unusable outdoors and for a while I would carry the XO-1 around with me instead of my laptop just because I could actually use it. Honestly if they keyboard had not been complete crap I might have never replaced my macbook.

Even today my laptops 500 nit display is only usable outdoors at 100% screen brightness and destroys my battery life.

robotnikman• 5 years ago

reality-distortion field type charismatic executive

This sounds like something you would read in a SCP article, but is the perfect description for those kind of leaders

achow• 5 years ago

At that time (~2003) I didn't realize the benefit - India govt asked MIT Media lab to leave India due to their high salaries and I guess lack of accountability..

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/technology-rift-...

clomond• 5 years ago

If I may riff and provide a potential view of a tangential alternative force that was at play that made the project destined to be doomed (via this approach you mention about un-implemented features across lower cost legacy hardware)

The declining costs of the hardware (screens, capacitive touch, battery, processor, memory, etc etc) via a Wright's Law/ Moore's Law type curve meant that over-optimizing around lowering the costs by choosing 'imperfect' hardware meant it was very difficult to ever get this going as a viable platform - which if we imagine a world of these costs declining 1/4 the rate (4x slower), this ecosystem would have more likely found enough backers and funding to get some more roots and sprouts going.

Ultimately, the cost curve declines of the other equipment meant that smartphones/Netbooks/tablets were bound to leapfrog it well before this OLPC 'formulation' was able to take off and be sustainable on its own.

mncharity2• 5 years ago

I (also peripherally involved) suggest OPLC had a unicorn-or-dead business plan, but stalled unexpectedly long in not-quite-dead but not-unicorn-yet, and didn't adapt well. Intel and Microsoft/Gates put a lot of effort towards dead. A unicorn story of "succeed (massive country-wide deployments), and they will come (developers, content creators, educators, etc; also network and power infrastructure, next-gen laptops, maintenance and deployment infrastructure, supply chains, etc)" means you're doing a minimum viable unicorn launch. So for illustration, when you're bouncing along, running out of runway, and Guido (python BDFL) publishes clueless criticisms, and the python open-source community isn't "showing up" to help, do you spend scarce funds on hiring a community outreach person to nudge that, or focus on making your next bounce just that little bit higher enough to ignite your unicorn rocket engine, and make training wheels and bootstrap wings a non-issue? Especially when a critical bottleneck isn't technical, but Bill flying around offering politicians Microsoft and Gates Foundation bounties on unicorn eggs.

So I suggest the goal was to trigger mass deployments, supporting subsequent refinement. I'm unclear on what/which technical improvements might have been sufficient to alter the deployment outcome. But people have been critiquing the unicorn-pathfinder-prototype-alpha-preview-0.0.3 unicorn corpse ever since. :)

musicale4• 5 years ago

Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project.

Be that as it may:

1. The research projects were kind of cool.

2. I suspect that OLPC paved the way for the netbook/chromebook/cheap laptop era.

3. And cheap tablets are even cheaper and work great for accessing khan academy and wikipedia as long as you can get free wi-fi somehow.

4. I still think it's a great idea to make computing (including programming) accessible to everyone, be it via web browsers, raspberry Pi, micro bit, cheap laptops/tablets, or whatever.

AussieWog93• 5 years ago

Honestly, your criticism sounds like it could be extended to non-profit/volunteer work in general; not just OLPC.

Without the "meet customer demands or starve" dynamic that places pressure on for-profit organisations, a whole lot of critical but unsexy work just doesn't get done.

bertil• 5 years ago

That’s why I like effective altruism: there’s a lot to be criticised on a purely utilitarian view of help, metrics are often wrong and all that, but any form of self-criticism is such a step-up from the usual white-saviour complex. "We stop this unless we reach that goal" feels horrifying to people on the ground who can’t accept why beneficiaries would be punished, until they realise that, no: you are taking away an unhelpful service. Potentially better options now have a budget. It’s messy and goes in circles but at least it doesn’t stay someone ineffective.

mirekrusin• 5 years ago

The funny thing about "pet projects" is that successful projects were also "pet projects" – linux, python etc. Nothing wrong with feeding your "pet project" per se.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

Both Linus and Guido are benevolent dictators in their own way but neither of them existed in a vacuum.

The lack of iteration and change of direction based on user/field feedback is probably the main difference here.

amelius• 5 years ago

But the point is that it doesn't work the other way around: not all pet projects become successful projects. In fact, very, very few pet projects ever ship.

mastazi• 5 years ago

currently returns "Bandwidth exceeded" but here's a snapshot from archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20211221041947/https://morganya....

ggm2• 5 years ago

I think a lot of "they should have just given them a laptop" commentators forget just how expensive these were at the time. Making a special BOM to make a "cheap" laptop would have walked into precisely the same problems OLPC hit.

Post-hoc reasoning.

I don't like some of the MIT post-hoc reasoning too. "we like this keyboard BECAUSE its hard for adults to use" is crap.

totalZero8• 5 years ago

a lot of "they should have just given them a laptop" commentators

Lol...I'm one such commenter on this submission.

how expensive these were at the time

This logic only works if you assume a direct, monotonic relationship between quantity of devices provided and net utility imparted to society.

Making a special BOM to make a "cheap" laptop would have walked into precisely the same problems OLPC hit.

You don't explain why you believe this to be true. Different technological implementations face different problems. If that were not the case, engineering would be a purposeless discipline. And there is no reason why "cheap" has to be a component of a philosophy behind contributing to the development of third-world economies and the communities from which those economies draw their manpower.

Post-hoc reasoning.

The book itself is a reflection on the project, so "post-hoc" should carry no dirty connotation. Moreover, the problem of providing technology to poor kids persists in the present day. Today, we see a very different device landscape and cost profile versus back in the year 2005.

ggm2• 5 years ago

> how expensive these were at the time
This logic only works if you assume a direct, monotonic relationship between quantity of devices provided and net utility imparted to society.

I'm not sure I buy that. MIT were driving to cheap because they were in a funding model which was value focussed on cost-per-unit. They rejected a lot of things which consumer devices have as normal, to reduce the BOM. If they'd gone with laptops they'd have driven to a higher cost outcome, irrespective of the social utility, and less units directly goes to less C in the OLP C sense. The utility function was "every child should have one" not "every classroom should have some"

> Making a special BOM to make a "cheap" laptop would have walked into precisely the same problems OLPC hit.
You don't explain why you believe this to be true. Different technological implementations face different problems. If that were not the case, engineering would be a purposeless discipline. And there is no reason why "cheap" has to be a component of a philosophy behind contributing to the development of third-world economies and the communities from which those economies draw their manpower.

This is two points in one. The BOM for a purpose built laptop would have wound up asking the same questions: can I get this made for my unit budget or do I have to find a compromise? They would have reduced the mAH of the battery, or reduced screen size, to the unit sizes which their supply chain could provide at the price.

The "cheap" drive was theirs. They brought cheap to the table, having rejected Gates' foundation support because it expressly demanded they adopt Microsoft product and align with that as the deliverable for "goodput" purposes. (I read this, I can't find references. If you have better information share, but I believe this to be the case right now) They brought cheap to the table because of their funding model. fixed capex but demanding maximum unit delivery. Uruguay wanted one unit per kid. They had a specified population. Uruguayan funding was contingent on every kid getting one. Now you have a budget problem, bring your BOM to the table.

> Post-hoc reasoning.
The book itself is a reflection on the project, so "post-hoc" should carry no dirty connotation. Moreover, the problem of providing technology to poor kids persists in the present day. Today, we see a very different device landscape and cost profile versus back in the year 2005.

No disagree on the last point. My primary complaint is there are a mix of things going on here, including stuff said at the time around how one-eyed Negroponte and Jepson were being, but some things said with hindsight were not how it was seen at the time. Like .. laptops. People are bringing modern unit cost to the table against what was feasible at the time. At the time, a viable laptop was going to bust their margins for their funding model. Negroponte was harking back to the glory days of the media labs, of MIT's influence on the nature of computing and society, and didn't want to be told practicalities and given what MIT had achieved in the past, it was tenable to think they might carry it off. Who knows, if sugar had more love, maybe it would be the interface du jour for education? I doubt it, but its not impossible. After all, nobody thought "zoom" was going to become the mechanism for education, and here we are.

wmf2• 5 years ago

Specifically, Intel made a craptop prototype to compete with OLPC and IIRC it was $400 while OLPC was $200 or less.

password4321• 5 years ago

See reports from the boots on the ground mostly ending in early 2019:

http://planet.laptop.org

protomyth2• 5 years ago

They wouldn't sell to poor Americans and relied on NGOs. If you were an organization in the US with lots of children that were low income, they wouldn't return your calls. The Give 1 Get 1 was not a help to those audiences. I just wish they had given a damn about the forgotten in the US.

dragonwriter4• 5 years ago

They wouldn't sell to poor Americans and relied on NGOs

They wouldn't sell to individuals generally (“poor Americans” weren't specially excluded), because their entire model (and the basis of their pricing) was direct bulk sales (or construction licenses) to public education entities (principally, national ministries of education), for use within public education curricula.

protomyth2• 5 years ago

Well, they wouldn't return the phone calls of at least one public education entity. I'm still a tad bit peeved at them and Google's Chromebook offer. At least Chromebooks were obtainable later on.

justin66• 5 years ago

They didn’t just reject selling to individuals, they rejected selling in large quantities to corporations, organizations or governments operating outside their educational mission. I recall thinking they’d never achieve real economies of scale in their production and therefore hit their $100 price point after witnessing a speech in which Negroponte responded to a question and acted as if selling the hardware to somebody like UPS or the USPS was the most ridiculous idea ever.

morganya8• 5 years ago

They initially targeted governments in the Global South and excluded North America, Europe, and other high-income countries (see http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/childrens_machin... for a summary of their thinking early on). This did shift over time, though.

morganya8• 5 years ago

Even NGOs were initially blown off - Negroponte initially said they'd only sell lots of no less than one million to governments directly. But when they didn't get any firm takers in the first couple of years of the project, they started loosening those requirements, which is how Paraguay Educa even got their foot in the door (with a project that initially only had 4000 laptops, later increased to around 10,000).

There was a rather badly-managed OLPC project in Birmingham, Alabama. I have a paper co-written with Mark Warschauer and Shelia Cotten on it - once my website is back up it'll be available here: https://morganya.org/research/Ames_OLPC_Birmingham.pdf

UIUC_06• 5 years ago

Negroponte got on 60 Minutes. That was the whole point, wasn't it? "A committee of scholars -- what could possibly go wrong?"

Actually, I saw a OLPC laptop back in the day. It was pretty nice, but you had the feeling that there was nothing there that other vendors couldn't do, and probably would fairly soon.

Is anyone in the Third World saying "Damn! If only we had those OLPC laptops!" No, they're using cheap Android phones and WhatsApp.

morganya8• 5 years ago

Hi everyone - I'm the author. Apologies that my website host hasn't been able to handle the traffic generated by this - I'm working on fixing that. But I'd be happy to answer questions! I'll be able to check back in a few hours.

totalZero8• 5 years ago

What was your opinion of Caacupé? Did the prevalence of Guaraní language among certain families present any difficulties for in-classroom use of OLPC devices? Was there a correlation between Spanish language competency and OLPC uptake/time-to-failure?

morganya8• 5 years ago

As with many projects, there was quite a range in acceptance/uptake! Language was certainly a factor (more rural schools - which were also poorer on average - tended to be more Guarani-centric), but I would say that based on my observations it was not the most significant factor for uptake at school or at home.

In the classroom, bigger factors that limited uptake were breakage, drained batteries (most classrooms had minimal charging capacity, and even that capacity had been installed by Paraguay Educa), uninstalled software, and lack of teacher time/resources to develop curricula and work around all of these issues. Paraguay Educa hired teacher trainers in early 2010 and had a rotating tech support team to help with these issues, and this extra staff made some headway, but that kind of ongoing cost wasn't something the small NGO could sustain, unfortunately. (I have a long discussion about funding for charismatic new projects vs. maintenance/sustainability of existing projects in the book - as with many tech projects, maintenance was certainly a big issue!)

Kids who used them at home did tend to be stronger in Spanish, but relatively few were using them much at all, Spanish-speaking or not. While I didn't see improvements in reading or math among those who were part of the project there between 2010 and 2013 testing (though the testing was really not my focus - the observations and interviews were - we still ran them), it's common in other 1:1 programs to have modest gains in literacy because enough kids are motivated to practice reading to make sense of what they encounter on the Internet.

I hope this helps! Happy to clarify or answer follow-ups!

unfolding• 5 years ago

This was hugged to death, is there a mirror?

morganya8• 5 years ago

Sorry! I definitely didn't factor in a HN frontpage link into my quota expectations with my webhost. There's an only-somewhat-broken version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211221041947/https://morganya....

ralphc• 5 years ago

I have one, and the main takeaway from me is that the software is dog slow. Other people here have talked about installing debian, what distros are available, and are they peppier?

wonnage• 5 years ago

The hardware goal of OLPC seems to have ultimately been solved by smartphones, which weren't even around in 2004. Billions of people live with a phone as their primary or only computing device.

The educational goals seem murkier. Not much has changed in the last 20 years, the plan still seems to be 1. laptops in the classroom 2. ??? 3. education!

throway453sde• 5 years ago

The project website is active and they are accepting donations, why is this project a failure when it still active?

gadders3• 5 years ago

I used to love reading the Fake Steve Jobs blog back in 2009/2010. He was mercilessly funny when discussing the OLPC project: https://www.fakesteve.net/tag/olpc

Jamustico• 5 years ago

Hey :)

brna• 5 years ago

Archive page: http://web.archive.org/web/20211221041947/https://morganya.o...

InfiniteRand• 5 years ago

So is the OLPC program still going on? Is it dead?

The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child

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